What’s new in Voice and Video Search in 2018?

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Vandita is a passionate writer and IT enthusiast. She is a Computer Lecturer by profession at the University of Delhi. She has previously worked as a Software Engineer with Aricent Technologies. Vandita writes for MarTech Advisor as a freelance contributor.

In today’s world where content is often said to be the king, voice and video will have a profound impact on how content is created, distributed and consumed. Naturally, the focus of marketers will be to reach the SERP and then stay at the top of it.

Let’s take a look at some of the top Voice and Video Search trends 2018.

Voice

With increasing sophistication in voice recognition technology, 2018 will see incremental increases in voice search which will eventually lead to a revolution.

1. Race to Rank Zero: For answering voice queries, digital assistants generally read snippets from sites ranked zero. This year will see optimizations for sites to appear in featured snippets. It helps to have dedicated resources for keyword research.

2. Understanding User Intent: As queries will be based on context, voice search will be able to interpret user intent based on her location, recent searches, and personal information. Creepy or cool? What do you think?

3.With the Rise of Smart Speakers, users are becoming more accustomed to using voice commands.

4.Long tail keywords will be adopted as complex and advanced search queries swell. With complex queries, now search will focus on comprehensive topics rather than terms.

5. Focus on Local and Hyper-local Results: Since people use voice on-the-go, search may have more local intent. Eg While shopping in a Mall, a user may ask “Stores near me selling Woodland merchandise”. Geo-location will become all the more important and there will be a compelling need to integrate local SEO.

6. Focus on FAQ pages: Since voice-based interactions are shorter, there will be fewer opportunities to make an impression. A high-quality FAQ page has a high probability of appearing as a featured-snippet. To create a strong FAQ page you can use Google Suggest by taking cues from trending questions in the drop-down list.

Video

Cisco says 80% of internet traffic will be videos. Consumption of video content is rapidly growing and so are the improvements in search sophistication. To get more traffic, the trend will be to create robust and compelling video content and optimize it for search.

1. Transcribed and Translated Videos: A well and fully transcribed video helps search engines to detect keywords. As most videos are watched silently, video transcriptions will help engage more viewers. A well-written transcript in a video will give you a huge SEO advantage.Video makers will also focus on globalizing their content by adding translations enriched with foreign language keywords to rank higher in a search.

2. How-to Videos: A user would typically want to watch a video in answer to a how-to question How-to? and tutorial videos will continue to see a surge in search results.

3. Live streaming videos: People now want to be connected to latest happenings and events in real-time. Search engines reward live streams as they are more relevant at the moment. As live content is more engaging, it will be more searched for and will form a major chunk of search streams.

4. Longer Videos: Competition with television is on the rise. The ultimate goal of video channels is to provide content at par with television, so video content of longer duration will be generated and searched. Videos that are 5 minutes or longer will have a better chance of gaining higher search rankings.

5. Automating Meta-data with AI and Proper Tags: Meta-data and tags include information like title, description, annotations etc. Meta-data has to be optimized for the video to stand out in search results. Sometimes certain tags get overused like genre, artist, title etc or meta generation may be limited by human ability, AI may be applied to process and qualify such vast volume of video content. This will bring advanced categorization and improved user experiences for better search and content discovery.

Voice and video search is exploding, and so grows the need to reach the user before anyone else. It’s yet to be seen how search space will evolve but with the vast amount of content being generated every second, optimizations for voice and video search will have to be performed faster.